Question

When I run the following code to test copying a directory, I get a System.IO.IOException when fileInfo.CopyTo method is being called. The error message is: ‘The process cannot access the file ‘C:\CopyDirectoryTest1\temp.txt’ because it is being used by another process.’

It seems like there’s a lock on file1 (‘C:\CopyDirectoryTest1\temp.txt’) which is created a few lines above where the error is occurring, but I don’t know how to release this if so. Any ideas?

using System; using System.IO;  namespace TempConsoleApp {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             string folder1 = @'C:\CopyDirectoryTest1';             string folder2 = @'C:\CopyDirectoryTest2';             string file1 = Path.Combine(folder1, 'temp.txt');              if (Directory.Exists(folder1))                 Directory.Delete(folder1, true);             if (Directory.Exists(folder2))                 Directory.Delete(folder2, true);              Directory.CreateDirectory(folder1);             Directory.CreateDirectory(folder2);             File.Create(file1);              DirectoryInfo folder1Info = new DirectoryInfo(folder1);             DirectoryInfo folder2Info = new DirectoryInfo(folder2);              foreach (FileInfo fileInfo in folder1Info.GetFiles())             {                 string fileName = fileInfo.Name;                 string targetFilePath = Path.Combine(folder2Info.FullName, fileName);                 fileInfo.CopyTo(targetFilePath, true);             }         }     } } 

Answer 1

File.Create returns an open FileStream – you need to close that stream.

Just

using (File.Create(file1)) {} 

should do the trick.